PLOT DEVELOPMENT
PLOT DEVELOPMENT Sir Walter Scott once said that in working out a plot he " took the easiest path across country." Doubtless this will account for the winding way by which the Wizard sometimes leads us. But not all masters of fiction found plot development so simple a process as a journey afield. To some it has always been the most arduous task of all the labor of fiction building. Here isa concrete instance of how easily conversation may bring out a plot-germ : Several friends were seated on my piazza lately while the talk drifted. " Thereis a professor of Psychology at col lege," said one, " who has sold his head to a learned society for $15,0o0. His head is of unique form and," he chuckled, " the society thinks it may be even more valuable after his death than it is now." " When is the money to be paid ? " queried another of the group. " The professor is already actually living on the $15,- 000, and —" "But," interposed a third, "what would happen if he should be lost at sea ? " " I wonder if the society has insured his life in their favor ? " pondered the first gentleman. And so the conversation went on. No one of the group has yet made a short-story out of the germ, but the query " what would happen? " holds several ingenious answers awaiting development. At just such a stage as this, plot development must be taken up in earnest. Then, with Poe, whose words follow, we long for some practical demonstration of how the master workman sets about his task. " I have often thought how interesting a magazine paper might be written by an author who would — that is to say, who could — detail, step by step, the processes by which any one of his compositions attained its ultimate point of completion. Why such a paper has never been given to the world, I am much at a loss to say — but perhaps the authorial vanity has had more to do with the omission than any one other cause. Most writers — poets in especial —prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy — an ecstatic intuition — and would positively shudder at letting the pub-1lic take a peep behind the scenes, at the elaborate and) vacillating crudities of thought — at the true purposes`, seized only at the last moment — at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view — at the fully-matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable — at the cautious selections and rejections — at the painful erasures and interpolations — in a word, at the wheels and pinions, the tackle for scene-shifting, the step-ladders and demon-traps, the cock's feathers, the red paint and the black patches, which in ninety-nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary histrio."13 Several well-known authors have since done precisely what Poe here suggests, and I can do no better than devote the rest of this chapter to two personally conducted tours in which successful writers take us into their work-shops." They are both novelists, it is true, but their words are full of meat for the short-story writer. The first conductor is the fecund Wilkie Collins." He is showing us how he wrote The Woman in White. " My first proceeding is to get my central idea — the pivot on which the story turns. The central idea in ' The Woman in White' is the idea of a conspiracy in private life, in which circumstances are so handled as to rob a woman of her identity, by confounding her with another woman sufficiently like her in personal appearance to answer the wicked purpose. The destruction of her identity represents a first division of her story; the recovery of her identity marks a second division. My central idea next suggests some of my chief characters. " A clever devil must conduct the conspiracy. Male devil or female devil? The sort of wickedness wanted seems to be a man's wickedness. Perhaps a foreign man. Count Fosco faintly shows himself to me before I know his name. I let him wait, and begin to think about the two women. They must be both innocent and both interesting. Lady Glyde dawns on me as one of the innocent victims. I try to discover the other — and fail. I try what a walk will do for me — and fail. I devote the evening to a new effort — and fail. Experience tells me to take no more trouble about it, and leave that other woman to come of her own accord. The next morning before I have been awake in my bed for more than ten minutes, my perverse brains set to work without consulting me. Poor Anne Catherick comes into the room, and says, ' Try me.' " I have now got an idea, and three of my characters. What is there to do now? My next proceeding is to begin building up the story. Here my favorite three efforts must be encountered. First effort : To begin at the beginning. Second effort : To keep the story always advancing, without paying the smallest attention to the serial division in parts, or to the book publication in volumes. Third effort: To decide on the end. All this is done as my father used to paint his skies in his famous sea-pictures — at one heat. As yet I do not enter into details ; I merely set up my land-' marks. In doing this, the main situations of the story present themselves in all sorts of new aspects. These discoveries lead me nearer and nearer to finding the right end. The end being decided on, I go back again to the beginning, and look at it with a new eye, and fail to be satisfied with it. " I have yielded to the worst temptation that besets a novelist — the temptation to begin with a striking incident without counting the cost in the shape of explanations that must and will follow. These pests of fiction, to reader and writer alike, can only be eradicated in one way. I have already mentioned the way — to begin at the beginning. In the case of ' The Woman in White,' I get back, as I vainly believe, to the true starting point of the story. I am now at liberty to set the new novel going, having, let me repeat, no more than an outline of story and characters before me, and leaving the details in each case to the spur of the moment. For a week, as well as I can remember, I work for the best part of every day, but not as happily as usual. An unpleasant sense of something wrong worries me. At the beginning of the second week a disheartening discovery reveals itself. I have not found the right beginning of ' The Woman in White' yet. The scene of my opening chapters is in Cumberland. Miss Fairlie (afterwards Lady Glyde) ; Mr. Fairlie, with his irritable nerves and his art treasures; Miss Halcombe (discovered suddenly, like Anne Catherick), are all awaiting the arrival of the young drawing master, Walter Hartwright. No; this won't do. The person to be first introduced is Anne Catherick. She must already be a familiar figure to the reader when the reader accompanies me to Cumberland. This is what must be done, but I don't see how to do it ; no new idea comes to me ; I and my MS. have quarreled, and don't speak to each other. One evening I happen to read of a lunatic who has escaped from an asylum — a paragraph of a few lines only in a newspaper. Instantly the idea comes to me of Walter Hartwright's midnight meeting with Anne Catherick escaped from the asylum. ' The Woman in White' begins again, and nobody will ever be half as much interested in it now as I am. From that moment I have done with my miseries. For the next six months the pen goes on. It is work, hard work ; but the harder the better, for this excellent reason : the work is its own exceeding great reward. As an example of the gradual manner in which I reached the 'development of character, I may return for a moment to Fosco. The making of him was an afterthought; his canaries and his white mice were found next; and, in the most valuable discovery of all, his admiration of Miss Halcombe, took its rise in a conviction that he would not be true to nature unless there was some weak point somewhere in his character." The second conductor shall be Sir Walter Besant." " Consider —say, a diamond robbery. Very well ; then, first of all, it must be a robbery committed under exceptional and mysterious conditions, otherwise there will be no interest in it. Also, you will perceive that the robbery must be a big and important thing — no little shop-lifting business. Next, the person robbed must not be a mere diamond merchant, but a person whose loss will interest the reader, say, one to whom the robbery is all-important. She will be, say, a vulgar woman with an overweening pride in her jewels, and of course, without the money to replace them if they are lost. They must be so valuable as to be worn only on extraordinary occasions; and too valuable to be kept at home. They must be consigned to the care of a jeweler who has 'strong-rooms. You observe that the story is now growing. You have got the preliminary germ. How can the strong-room be entered and robbed? Well, it cannot. That expedient will not do. Can the diamonds be taken from the lady while she is wearing them? That would have done in the days of the gallant Claude Duval, but it will not do now. Might the house be broken into by a burglar on a night when a lady had worn them and returned? But she would not rest with such a great property in the house unprotected. They must be taken back to their guardian the same night. Thus the only vulnerable point in the care of the diamonds seems their carriage to and from their guardian. They must be stolen between the jeweler's and the owner's house. Then by whom? The robbery must somehow be connected with the hero of the love story — that is indispensable; he must be innocent of all complicity in it — that is equally indispensable ; he must preserve our respect; he will have to be somehow a victim : how is that to be managed ? " The story is getting on in earnest. . . The only way—or the best way — seems, on consideration, to make the lover be the person who is entrusted with the carriage of this precious package of jewels to and from the ownees house. This, however, is not a very distinguished role to play ; it wants a very skilled hand to interest us in a jeweler's assistant — We must therefore give this young man an exceptional position. Force of circumstances, perhaps, has compelled him to accept the situation which he holds. He need not again be a shop man ; he may be a confidential employe, holding a position of great trust; and he may be a young man with ambitions outside the narrow circle of his work. " The girl to whom he is engaged must be lovable to begin with; she must be of the same station in life as her lover — that is to say, of the middle class, and preferably of the professional class. As to her home circle, that must be distinctive and interesting." And so on to the end. This is enough, however, to turn the author's reasoning processes inside out for our examination.